How can you open ourselves to the love around you? Are you blocking yourself fromunconditional love when you see your life as a “hot mess?”
Or are you secretly seeking love and compassion from others by letting them witness your hot mess? After all the Oxford definition of Hot Mess is, “A person or thing that is spectacularly unsuccessful or disordered, especially one that is a source of peculiar fascination.” Whether you know it or not — you are asking people to look at you.
Articles in Time Magazine, Salon and Stuff all point to various reasons why a person might want others to see them as a hot mess.
For some it can be standing up to say no one has their life together and to announce that the pressures we put on ourselves to have a perfect appearance, relationship, job and life can be completely overwhelming. Others ask others to love them despite the fact that their life is not together.
Whether you’re identifying your life as a hot mess or someone else is, we are judging ourselves or being judged on what our lives should be.
Does this judgment come with a belief we aren’t loveable until our life is together? Or are we simply giving into the idea that we’ll never have the life we want?
Judgment can make desired changes even harder — I see this in my own life and in the lives of those I coach. When you get mad at yourself for repeating patterns in your life — the “I’ve done it again” mentality — we often don’t understand that we’re choosing to waste the energy we would normally use to do something different on being angry at ourselves.
That anger actually creates more of a hot mess in our lives than what existed before. I encourage you to turn that self-judgement into curiosity.
Louise Hay and Robert Holden discuss in their book, Life Loves You: 7 Spiritual Practices to Heal Your Life, that the first practice is to look at yourself in the mirror and say the words “life loves you,” then notice what happens in your body, your emotions and your thoughts. It’s this curiosity that opens you up to ask yourself — are you really letting life love you?
When I first did this, I noticed my heart tighten — old thoughts about how I’m not deserving of love until I met some condition I made myself popped up, and all I wanted was to turn away from the mirror.
The exercise ends by inviting you to say, “I am willing to let life love me today.” You must keep reminding yourself of how life loves you, how you need to continue to love yourself, and that you need to keep exploring how to keep from stopping yourself from receiving love. This exploration continues on until you are open to receiving love with gratitude and opens us up to blessing the world with your love.
Tango